Twitter: How To Use It For Networking

There is no substitute in this day and age to having a Twitter presence. Maintaining an online Twitter account is simple, easy and vital to your career. Learn how from Monster.

Twitter is an undeniably valuable job seeking, networking and career advancement tool. A poll asking people if they used Twitter in their job search came up with 12 percent of them saying yes - which is 8 percent higher than last year. You can only imagine what the future holds.

Social media accounts keep you up to date, help you find network contacts you could never find in real life, and speak volumes to your credibility.

The following few easy steps are all you need to take to have and use Twitter to look for a hot job.

1. Create an account on Twitter.com

This will take you a second. Make sure that your user name is professional and appropriate. Spend some time crafting your bio, and get people interested in you. This is the place to talk about your passion and your goals.

2. Search for people to follow

This is basically your virtual network. The tweets these people tweet will be displayed on your Twitter page. Twitter will offer you categories to browse from and also match existing Twitter users with your address book contacts. Add people you respect, industry leaders and companies you would potentially like to work at. Then note who these people follow.

3. Get active.

Participate in conversations (keeping respectful professionalism in mind, of course) with people you are following. Retweet interesting tweets to start interesting dialogues.This should help you with your next step, which is:

4. Attract followers and build a reputation

Once you share your own insights, humor and achievements, you are in the race to being someone people want to hear from. However, this stresses the all-too important idea of maintaining professionalism. After all, laughing with your friends about playing hooky from work is not something you want potential employers to see you doing. 

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